Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to globalization verification testing and, more particularly, automatically enabling and verifying localization.
Description of the Related Art
Globalization verification testing (GVT) is implemented during the functional verification testing (FVT) phase of development. The goal of GVT is to identify functional defects related to international operation. The globalization verification test ensures that the product can run in an international environment after translation. It would be very difficult to verify all language versions of all operating systems, so it is not practical to run a full test of a product in all environments. GVT therefore incorporates the use of specialized tools to verify functions in different environments.
One part of GVT is a locale enablement verification test. This stage assesses the locale awareness of a system under test. The enablement of new locales in a system can involve a substantial amount of effort in planning, design, and verification. Verification is generally performed after the locales are built and added to the system. This puts overhead on the testing phase to identify all errors relating to previous development phases that remained in the testing phase.
Conventional locale object verification is conducted by converting locale data using custom tools from globalization libraries to machine-friendly locale seed files which locale compiler can read, parse, and compile. Those files, along with configuration files (such as Makefiles), are included and compiled in the build of new system releases. After the new release of the system, the testing team runs the locale verification test to verify the updated locale objects. If defects are detected, the development team tries to find the root cause of the defects and fix them. The system is then rebuilt and the cycle is repeated until all defects are fixed and the system is released. This manual procedure has a high human resource cost and exposes the system source code to the third party testing company.